Ylva Fernaeus

Since February 2024 deputy director of Umarts and associtae professor at Umeå Institute of Design. Before this associate professor in interaction design at KTH since 2010, where I am still working at 30%.

Leader of the Art & AI focus area at TAIGA. 

Works within the fields of tangible and embodied interaction, with focus on design philosophy, in particular around hybrid crafting as a careful, playful and critical practice, always at interplay with the fragility and limitations of the material world and the living. I have worked in several projects concerned with designing with robotic, autonomous and so called "smart" technologies.

This research orientation is addressed through three main themes:

- Longevity of interactive systems, exploring design strategies with a focus on care, repair and craft, as a counter-reaction to the innovation-frenzy that has dominated our field during the last decades. Examples include a study of a 150 year old jacquard loom still in use, and articulations of wabi-sabi as a design philosophy within HCI.

- Material understandings of interaction design practice, including ways of understanding computer programming as materially- and socially grounded. Examples include conceptions around bricolage within interaction design, new tools and resources for programming, and explorations of hybrid crafting using electronics in combination with materials such as wood, leather, silver and textiles.

- Electricity as the "vis viva" of interaction, exploring possibilities of working with e.g. manually-powered devices, and interactive systems optimised for efficient and scarse energy usage, and experiential qualties of such designs. This includes conceptual design work as well as development of new tools and resources.

Teaching topics include methods and theory related to interaction design and product design, but also supervision of projects at master- doctoral- and postdoctoral level.